Boys in the Band → Angels in America → The Inheritance

10/16/18 (Tues)

I’m glad to see that The Inheritance has moved deservedly from the Young Vic to an open-ended West End run, winning rave reviews in the process. It’s especially interesting to look back on this play in the context of two other powerhouse NY-based gay-themed shows that have been revived in NY and London in recent months, Boys in the Band and Angels in America.

The Broadway Boys was an expert recreation of the groundbreaking drama from the late 1960s (this was its 50th (!) anniversary) with no editing or updating – the attitudes remain firmly entrenched in the unenlightened sixties, including the self-loathing and casual racism of a gay community still struggling to find its place. Viewed from the 21st century, the play basically excises the misty water-colored memories of the times and leaves us with the rest. The London Angels, which was brought more or less intact to New York (and happily filmed for broadcast, which I saw in Tokyo), also faithfully resurrects the attitudes of its time, the 1980s, when the gay world was fighting on two fronts: the devastation wrought by AIDS, and social indifference (as perceived by the playwright) — though once all the dated politics are stripped away, the show boils down to a (beautiful) love story.

That is, the plays taken together show a progression from the hidden and paranoid gay world of the 1960s (six of the nine original Boys were secretly gay, all of whom died later of AIDS) to the politically angry gay world of the Reagan-era Angels and on to the yuppie near-normal gay world of the millennials in The Inheritance, which specifically questions our relation with and debt to the past. I hope I’m around to see the next big show sometime in the 2040s. An unintentional but enlightening confluence of shows.